Brexit: Vote Again
Popular votes are not infallible; when the stakes are very high, it makes sense to take more time to find a more unified, and unifying, less divisive decision.
From a distance, at least, Brexit doesn't appear to offer the UK many advantages, unless it is to an elite whose interests moved the decision in the first place.
The People may make major mistakes. We do, and we also fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences. Take Prohibition: Once passed, it created crime and criminal activity out of what had previously been a legal and even essential business. The government depended on tax revenue from alcohol sales.
At the time (1915-1920) of the campaign for prohibition, the US had disproportionate representation. Each rural vote counted for more than each urban vote. The majority of citizens were not in favor of prohibition, and were not militantly anti-alcohol. However, a super-majority of state legislatures were prohibitionist (because of disproportionate representation).
The issue was revisited a decade later. The national experience of prohibition had shown the people that prohibition had too many negative downsides. It was repealed by another supermajority.
A constitutional amendment is complicated enough, but pulling out of the multi-layered bureaucracy of a complex trade agreement is likely to be much more complicated, and once done won't be at all easy to undo, or it may be impossible to undo.
So, my sources of information are fairly limited: The Guardian, mainly. I just don't see how pulling out of the existing setup will result in a more dynamic economy capable of fueling a high level of growth, increased tax revenues, and increased layouts for essentials like the NHS.
Brexit should be submitted to a vote again, or it should be overridden by parliament (if that is possible).
From a distance, at least, Brexit doesn't appear to offer the UK many advantages, unless it is to an elite whose interests moved the decision in the first place.
The People may make major mistakes. We do, and we also fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences. Take Prohibition: Once passed, it created crime and criminal activity out of what had previously been a legal and even essential business. The government depended on tax revenue from alcohol sales.
At the time (1915-1920) of the campaign for prohibition, the US had disproportionate representation. Each rural vote counted for more than each urban vote. The majority of citizens were not in favor of prohibition, and were not militantly anti-alcohol. However, a super-majority of state legislatures were prohibitionist (because of disproportionate representation).
The issue was revisited a decade later. The national experience of prohibition had shown the people that prohibition had too many negative downsides. It was repealed by another supermajority.
A constitutional amendment is complicated enough, but pulling out of the multi-layered bureaucracy of a complex trade agreement is likely to be much more complicated, and once done won't be at all easy to undo, or it may be impossible to undo.
So, my sources of information are fairly limited: The Guardian, mainly. I just don't see how pulling out of the existing setup will result in a more dynamic economy capable of fueling a high level of growth, increased tax revenues, and increased layouts for essentials like the NHS.
Brexit should be submitted to a vote again, or it should be overridden by parliament (if that is possible).
Comments (50)
And if the result's the same will that put an end to this nonsensical campaign to overturn a decision that's been made for better or worse or will there be cries for a third vote and then a fourth? And if the result is different do you imagine that the other side then won't start calling for a best of three, or four or five? The one thing that will unquestionably do damage is doing nothing while no decision is made at all. The vote is binding and must be so. How about the losers stop whining about it and actually put some effort into making the best possible and most dignified exit if the claim to be so enamoured of the country they are apparently hjappy to throw into a state of permanent limbo.
There's currently a court case that seeks to ensure that Brexit requires Parliamentary approval, which will give MPs the option of not passing it. I'd expect the Scottish and Northern Irish MPs to vote against it, given that their constituencies did, but the chances of the English and Welsh MPs voting against their constituencies and the expected party whip is pretty low.
Binding in what sense? Legally, no. Maybe the government has a moral obligation to accept it? But then depending on the High Court case (or, rather, the Supreme Court after the inevitable appeal), it might not be up to the government.
Should the courts find against the Government the constitutional crisis that follows will make Brexit itself seem like very small beer! I'm not sure those bringing the case have really considered the implications of winning it!
Same could be said about Brexit if it precipitates Scottish independence and Irish reunification.
The liberal commentariat is strongly 'Remain' and still can't seem to get over losing the vote. I voted Brexit. Here's Jenny Jones presenting the Green case before the vote: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/eu-reform-green-brexit
Paul Mason made a socialist case for Brexit before the vote. Here's a recent article by him: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/10/paul-mason-how-left-should-respond-brexit
The EU is a rich countries' club. It's likely to have more rather than less internal strife in the near future. It's not a liberal cause: it exists to keep the free flow of labour and especially capital within the EU boundaries. It's not a great example of subsidiarity: making decisions at the lowest possible level.
I don't personally think the referendum vote is binding, but it would be a brave government that defied the result, and much of the talk about revisiting the vote is wishful thinking: many people still can't quite believe it, and keep telling me about the supposed Brexit voters who already wish they hadn't (the empirical evidence is slim for that). Many middle-class people I know were more emotionally attached to the whole project than I'd realised; to me it wasn't about whether I'm a European, it was a vote about being in a customs union that had grown rather big for its boots. Norwegians and Swiss still manage a good impersonation of Europeanness outside the union.
It turns out quite a lot of personal feeling was also invested in the freedom of their children and grandchildren to work in Europe; there are lots of tales about how to obtain an irish or other eu passport.
Still, I'm very glad it brings France, Germany and Italy together, for stability's sake.
Many of the economic forecasts of short-term doom have turned out to be ill-judged. There's certainly going to be a period of uncertainty, but that's what a big constitutional change does. I'm not clear if the medium-term economic forecasts are any less politicised than the short-term ones were.
Well, according to this 7% of those surveyed regretted their vote to leave, which if an accurate representation amounts to 1.2 million.
It says 'up to 7%' regretted their Leave vote and '3%' regretted their Remain vote: one week afterwards. This seems flimsy, and too soon, to me.
Here's a YouGov focus group survey, a month after, that doesn't find regret a big theme: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/11/yougov-focus-groups/
I don't think there's much empirical evidence. And what would it show? A vote was held on a certain date which we all knew had been coming for months.On what criteria is one to claim that this particular vote among all the votes that have ever been held was somehow wrong? These discussions seem pointless to me. We have to get on and work out what our agriculture and food policy is going to be, and put pressure on the trade negotiations, and decide our immigration criteria, and so forth. The business now is, how to move forward, not keep replaying a vote.
Anyway, it's my perception that the economy was not the reason why most people voted the way they did. I was a poling officer for the vote, and the mood in my poling station was that people were fed up of the creeping control from Brussels and the lack of sovereignty and were happy to take an economic hit. This was in rural Suffolk.
Also, it was an anti-establishment backlash, so the media being of the establishment will inevitably show some bias in favour of the doom and gloom perspective.
Less of "the losers" and "they" when making such criticisms, please. I don't mind being called a loser in that context, because it's correct: we lost. But we are not a homogeneous group with identical opinions on everything related to Brexit, so please don't tar with the same brush.
I agree more with you, and with most Leavers, than many of the Remainers in this respect. And there are many others just like me.
Yes, agreed: those and other important issues which might not be such a priority for the Tories. I'm with Jeremy Corbyn on this one, who has taken a similar stance - unlike his former rival in the leadership contest, Owen Smith, who I'm glad he wiped the floor with; and unlike other prominent political figures on the Remain side, such as Nicola Sturgeon.
So, what do you expect to happen in your life (job, housing, cost of living, etc.) as a result of Brexit, assuming that the exit is negotiated with a middle-of-the-road outcome (neither the worst possible or best possible)?
Also, do you perceive the EU as a meddlesome presence in your own sphere?
I sometimes wonder how the EU manages to accomplish anything, (despite seeing obvious positive functioning) when a few Walloons can hold up the treaty between the EU and Canada.
Both those outcomes are extremely unlikely - it may be possible to win a referendum in Scotland though I doubt it but not in Northern Ireland - but neither would precipitate a constitutional crisis because it does not mount a challenge to the Government's right and ability to govern.
Otherwise the EU didn't effect me as far as I can tell. It's difficult to detect the subtle influences though, which have crept in over the last forty years.
I am critical of the Eu organisation, but I do enjoy and favour the freedoms it has given us, as a European citizen. If it could have been reformed from within, that would have been my preferred option, but I can't see how it can be, it is so disfunctional and dogmatic.
I think the Canada treaty problem suggests a juggernaut so big and unwieldy that it finds it hard to steer.
I expect a minor short-term drop in standard of living compared to how it might have been; what I think Remainers miscalculated is that in poorer areas such as where I live, real wages haven't risen for years so short-term economic issues don't count for much. London and the South East feels like another much more affluent country to me, with enormous public investment in infrastucture, for instance, even among people who claim to be ideologically opposed to it.
My wife's an immigration lawyer so I'm expecting Brexit to be quite good for business! She's an (American) immigrant; it's very unclear at the moment what the immigration policy will be, I expect some sort of need-based system - need being defined by businesses, with the Tories in power. I'm a bit shocked that the Tories have made some early noises about discouraging foreign students, since that brings income and intellectual enrichment to us. The higher education system is on tenterhooks because their funding and their admissions are EU-networked, and the UK gets a disproportionate amount of EU research money; either a new system is needed or the present system will be re-adopted lock stock and barrel (EU students pay the same fees as Brits at the moment).
The ease of country-to-country work movement is a worry to people I know, but despite the tabloids I don't expect big inroads into workers' rights, we're already among the most anti-union in the EU. There's plenty of rhetoric around about ditching red tape and barmy EU rules, but in practice an awful lot of regulation of industry, banking and retail is Europe-wide, Norway Switzerland et al included, and our producers will have to conform to EU standards to sell there.
All in all, uncertainty seems the greatest difficulty at the moment. The quality of the pre-referendum debate was so appallingly poor that the issues at stake have been little debated, and even now there's little talk - and a lot of wittering as if the referendum could somehow be undone by right-minded people. The Guardian seems to be going through a rubbish period and mostly I've moved over to the Independent for clearer-sightedness. I keep trying to engage Green people for instance in talk about food and farming, where the UK may be reinventing a policy from scratch, but there's little interest in such debates yet.
I expect at least some of the predictions about the detrimental consequences of Brexit to come true. I'm more sceptical of the beneficial predications. £350M for the NHS would be nice. Perhaps we'll see it some time soon when pigs can fly.
There has already been detrimental consequences on the cost of living, as predicted, due to the looming prospect of Brexit - and, of course, we haven't even left yet. As for the other two, I'm not so sure, but I'm sure there have been foreboding predictions about those as well, which, at the very least, shouldn't just be dismissed.
As for how these things will effect me personally, I'm not sure. My employer is an Australian company that has recently bought a top D.I.Y. chain here in the UK, and we seem to be doing alright so far. We kept our jobs and got a pay rise when they took over earlier this year.
As you know, any negative effect on housing will likely aggravate my present situation - as will increases to the cost of living, though perhaps to a lesser extent. (Slight increases in the cost of bread or milk, for example, just don't strike me as alarming, personally. I don't pay very close attention to that sort of thing when I'm out shopping).
Quoting Bitter Crank
The way that you've phrased that carries negative connotations, but I don't think that it's all bad. I think that there is some good, too. But I trust the unfortunately out-of-government Labour party more with those sorts of things.
Well there's part of your problem.
Tough nuts I say. That's how democracy works. If you don't like the decision, then you probably don't like democracy.
Who likes bad decisions? Democracy allows bad decisions, so it clearly has a downside. It's not a simple matter of liking or not liking democracy. It's a matter of what is right and what is wrong, and a question of how far we should go.
In other words... they can't partake of the benefits of centralized authority. Since that centralization in the US is the result of a civil war, I couldn't criticize... even if I was inclined to.
So Brexit may have been inevitable. From a physics perspective, it's just a matter of time before the right kind and amount of stress comes along and the EU will basically be gone.
I think the lesson is that the complexities of modern economics and politics are far beyond the capacity of the electorate to understand and manage. Ignorant enthusiasm often carries the day by stirring up the emotions of millions of uninformed voters, who then stampede blindly into an imagined 'solution' which is only going to excacerbate the problem. Brexit, Trump, climate-change denialism, and protectionism are all examples - the subjects are so difficult that the voter can't understand the details, and will follow those who promise them the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I think what is beyond the capacity of the electorate to understand and manage is being presented with several confused, partially true and partially false, incompatible sets of facts and opinions, each delivered with truth-telling conviction. Professional economists and skilled political operators aren't able to make sense of this jumble of deceit either.
The People can handle the fact that there is often real conflicting information when it is honestly presented in a straightforward way. The American people were presented witddh false information about Iraq's WMDs, and much else. If the president says the Iraqis were building nuclear weapons, who is in a position to contradict that? Not very many. It isn't a deficiency in the people's reasoning that they did not guess that the Iraqi WPMs were a fabrication.
I fully understand why this straightforward approach does not occur. Professional politicians and advocates want to obscure the truth of the matter as much as possible so that their views might prevail. If people aren't honest, you can't do business. If people aren't honest, you can't do good politics or international relations either.
The situation is that professional politicians can not deal with inconvenient facts and will not communicate honestly about them.
Another case was the Australian carbon tax. This was introduced under a previous Labor (i.e. left) Government. But the then-conservative opposition leader siezed on the issue as a 'Great Big New Tax on Everything', and scared the hell out of the electorate. Then when he got into Parliament, he abolished the carbon tax, which was doing exactly what it was designed to do, and replaced it with mickey-mouse legislation that does precisely FA. What was abolished was one of the most effective pieces of carbon abatement policy in the developed world, and for purely political reasons. Nowadays the subject is virtually dead, nobody talked about it in the US election campaign, it's barely mentioned here. And that is at least partially because it's a really big, difficult, politically-charged and contentious topic. It's all too hard. Politicians avoid it in droves.
I'm a technical writer - basically I write instructions and user-guides for IT systems. Earlier this year I got a job, which might have gone full-time, except they wanted to dismantle all their online documentation and turn it into videos and brief articles. 'Nobody reads user guides anymore', they say. People are used to clicking on links to a video to tell them how to use something. I ended up walking away from that contract, because I thought they were actually degrading their product by doing it. They were 'endumbing' their product, I thought (and told them so.)
But I think this kind of attitude is actually leading to the endumbing of the populace. (That hardly applies to anyone here, but then, this is a philosophy forum, it is frequented by people who can put arguments together and write persuasively). But a lot of people can hardly be bothered concentrating long enough to read anymore. Everything is sound-bytes, pictures, videos - because it's easy, like today's food culture. Instead of having to carve a chicken, it comes in a neat little plastic tray, already crumbed. Meanwhile the world is changing at a faster rate that at any time in history, the amount of information is exploding, and the kinds of problems we're facing more complex than ever before.
And it was inevitable, that the first exit would be a country that was only half in EU any way - no Euro, no Schengen.
What is becoming clearer with each passing humanitarian disaster, be it in the Mediterranean or on the Promenade des Anglais, is that the EU doesn't work. Or rather, its main function, which is to extort money from countries in return the imposition of German policies is working rather well.
The migrant crisis is a case in point. This was a policy decision made unilaterally by Germany, which has affected every other country in the EU, and involves the overturning of the Dublin Convention - i.e. breaking EU law.
Then there is the economic crisis in southern Europe, which has been manufactured solely to deflate the Euro in order to ensure German prosperity. We forget that democracy has been suspended in Italy and Greece!
Brexit may not happen this time, but it will happen.
I presume that the people who are going to do the implementation are a relatively small number of bureaucrats. It doesn't make any difference what the said bureaucrats voted for. Their job is implementation, regulation writing, negotiation, etc. OF COURSE several million voters are not going to negotiate or implement. That wasn't the case when the UK first affiliated with the EU.
There was a rueful comment on this the other day:
Remainers (left holding the Brexit baby after the Leavers… left) “WTF?”
Leavers “We voted Brexit, now You Remainers need to implement it”
Remainers “But it’s not possible!”
Leavers “The People Have Spoken. Therefore it is possible. You just have to think positively.”
Remainers “And do what exactly?”
Leavers “Come up with a Plan that will leave us all better off outside the EU than in it”
Remainers “But it’s not possible!”
Leavers “Quit with the negative vibes. The People Have Spoken.”
Remainers “But even you don’t know how!”
Leavers “That’s your problem, we’ve done our bit and voted, we’re going to sit here and eat popcorn and watch as you do it.”
Remainers “Shouldn’t you do it?”
Leavers “It’s not up to us to work out the detail, it’s up to you experts.”
Remainers “I thought you’d had enough of experts”
Leavers “Remain experts.”
Remainers “There are no Leave experts”
Leavers “Then you’ll have to do it then. Oh, and by the way, no dragging your feet or complaining about it, because if you do a deal we don’t want, we’ll eat you alive.”
Remainers “But you don’t know what you want!”
Leavers “We want massive economic growth, no migration, free trade with the EU and every other country, on our terms, the revival of British industry, re-open the coal mines, tea and vicars on every village green, some bunting, and maybe restoration of the empire.”
Remainers “You’re delusional.”
Leavers “We’re a delusional majority. DEMOCRACY! So do the thing that isn’t possible, very quickly, and give all Leavers what they want, even though they don’t know what they want, and ignore the 16 million other voters who disagree. They’re tight trouser latte-sipping hipsters who whine all the time, who cares.”
By Ishtar Ostaria
Source: ft.com
There is a very long tradition of dismissing the common man as too stupid to tie his own shoes. The elite of Britain could not cast enough aspersion on their 'common man' back in the 15th and 16th centuries. Oddly enough, when the stupid worthless yokels landed on these shores, and had to survive by dint of hard work and brains, they did.
Oh, I know: a large number of people can't balance a checkbook; they read at a 6th - to - 8th grade level (not a very high level), don't know where their own state is on a map, don't know who their governor is, don't quite get why ground meat should be cooked to 168ºF, and so on and so forth. Or slice meat neatly off a chicken.
But the thing is, one has to need to do these things, and has to have a reason to maintain the skill. I know very well educated people who are always getting lost driving because they have given up the use of maps. I haven't balanced a checkbook in years. (I do know how -- I just don't write checks anymore.) I don't think I've ever needed to identify my state on a map or identify the current governor. (but I could... if asked)
As for slicing a chicken up, if one hasn't been taught how to do this, one probably doesn't know how. We aren't born knowing how to locate the hip joint of a bird.
I'm not actually dissing the working classes in any of this. I'm commenting on the uniquely difficult problems of the 21st century, such as this one. It's a comment about the demands of coming to an informed judgement about complex social and political issues, it's not tied to class.
Yes, I read that in the shout box, or wherever you posted it. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Brexit situation reminds me of Prohibition: the people who voted for it in 1919 weren't the ones who were going to have to enforce the stupid constitutional amendment. The people who did have to enforce it had a range of responses, from enforcement with a vengeance to somehow never seeing alcohol being sold. I wish the implementors and writers of regulations, and so on all the success in the world. I still hope somebody figures out a way of aborting Brexit.
Good. But life has been difficult for all classes of people for a very long time (except the small number of most pampered persons). People at all sorts of levels in society, dealing with varying levels of complexity, have had a tough time of succeeding.
Yes: life is complicated, and is not getting simpler year in, year out. One of the reasons for this complexity is off-loading tasks onto people that have too many things to do--things like figuring out how to use the fucking clunky software that some autistic programmer produced, or figure out how to turn off all the new bells and whistles that some corporation decided to stuff their software with so it always looked new and "better" somehow... Microsoft and Apple are both guilty of this.
A lot of our "complexity" is needless. That's a big fat glittering generality that should take a few threads to untangle.
The EU does achieve the purpose for which it was set up(so far so good, however in the current climate I can see this changing) namely to bring the countries of Europe together with a joint purpose as an antidote to perpetual conflict.
But in terms of politics it is disfunctional and dictatorial. No member can instigate change (except perhaps Germany, or France), all members are subject to a relentless implementation of a certain politic which is decided behind closed doors by a faceless beurocracy. Alongside this, which does not seem to be acknowledged here, is that there is a continuous project of further integration going on, both economic and political, "an ever greater union". However The UK has always been fundamentally against the political union, while in favour of greater (to a degree) economic integration. This split was inevitable due to these political circumstances, it is the EU bureaucrats who have been in denial of this reality. The UK, both as a government and as a people were never in favour of, or going to accept such political integration.
Europe is some sort of (fairly clunky) federal system. Formerly sovereign (still sovereign, I guess) states agree to join a centrally administered European Union and give up some/most/all the prerogatives of independent states.
The first effort to organize a union under the Articles of Confederation didn't work out all that well for us, and required a do-over (the constitution we now have). A Civil War was required to fully establish the principle of indissoluble union. Once in you stay in, period. Yes, slavery was an over-riding issue, but the southern states that would secede from the union weren't anxious to cooperate too much with each other in a lot of practical matters--like building what could have been a Confederacy-wide railroad system. Each of the southern states only built the railroad that it's richest citizens wanted, which wasn't much. The southerners didn't want a strong government vs. the local economic interests.
All of this is compounded in Europe, given its much longer history and the clutter of distinct administrative and governing cultures and conflicting interests.
Maybe the English Channel is part of the problem. Perhaps it gives Britain a sense of separateness from Europe it really shouldn't have. Geographical Determinism at work. We are an Island in ever so many ways. One would think, though, if the UK could digest an influx of Indians, Pakistanis, other Asians, Jamaicans, and various Africans it could also manage a batch of Catholic Poles. But... maybe not.
The problem is more like the proverbially variable tide -- rising for some, sinking for others, with boats going up and down right next to each other. It seemed like the EU had done quite a bit to equalize the tide -- didn't it?
The main thing is, once out of the EU Britain will have to deal with falling tides all by it's island self. Rising tides are of course easier to deal with, but if I were a Brit I wouldn't have counted on that.
It's not too late. You haven't left yet. You have not put the Brexit shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger... yet.
Immigration can be a very good thing (all those immigrants coming to the US, for instance) and Europe is scarcely reproducing it's workforce on its own. Get busy, you lazy heterosexual Caucasians, or somebody else will do your reproducing for you.
It does need to be controlled, however, closer to the source. The developed countries don't seem to understand that Lebanon and Jordan need assistance in taking in and keeping many more Syrian refugees than Europe was ever thinking of taking in. (Saudi Arabia, for instance, has taken in... how many?)
The short-term economic impact of the brexit vote has been minimal. An odd thing abourt the 59bn figure being talked about today is (a) it's just another future forecast, over several years; (b) it treats the impact of the fall in the value of sterling straight after the referendum vote as 'an effect of Brexit'. Sterling needed to fall anyway, say many commentators.
There will be an adverse economic effect next year - of uncertainty not precisely of Brexit.
The leading parties were all, and still are, led by supporters of Remain, or equivacators like Labour. So they are struggling to find a direction. Obviously I'm waiting for the call!
I think the EU is too large, has become dysfunctional and imposes a German view of macroeconomics on other countries to whom it's disadvantageous.
In that respect, since the arguments advanced in favour of leaving the EU were demonstrably speculative – some would even say misleading - and since only now are the negative economic consequences of the decision becoming clearer it seems to me a perverse judgment that to provide the opportunity for a now more informed electoral decision would somehow constitute a retrospective subversion of the democratic will!
In practice of course, the leading pro-brexiteers are to some extent aware of the negative consequences that inevitably must ensue following Britain’s economicaly illiterate descion to disengage from the world's largest economic unit – but they consider it a price that justifiably can be imposed on Britain’s poor in order to preserve their visceral ideological conceptions concerning what constitutes national sovereignty.